Colmar

Our first day in Colmar was spent cleaning up the van at the campsite and me catching up on the blog and re-adjusting the new mirror. That evening we played cards and watched a movie. It was still early in the day when we arrived in Colmar, but we just weren’t up to touring. The following day (April 6) we left the campsite and found parking just outside the centre of town. The town map provided us with a suggested walking route which we decided to follow. Now we knew we were in France but we couldn’t help feel its German vibe. All of the buildings and alleyways scream Germany, but the shops are definitely French. Colmar was a really nice town to visit and to wander around. I felt I was almost successful twice in convincing Julie to visit a coffee shop or a restaurant, though she told me later that I wasn’t even close, everything was too expensive. There was a castle near by that we had decided on visiting that day. Now, I thought I remembered it being located in Mulhouse, so that’s where we went, all 60 km south of Colmar. However, when we arrived in Mulhouse we realized almost immediately that it wasn’t the right town, and confirmed it when I decided to look at the brochure. The castle was located just 15 km west of Colmar, and what I was thinking of was the old car museum that was located in Mulhouse. Slight mistake and it wasn’t the first one of the day. I was stubborn and wanted Julie to visit this castle so we headed back towards Colmar (this was easy to convince Julie since Dijon appeared to be in the same direction). Well, as it turns out the route to the castle is not well labeled. When we finally turned onto the correct road it was blocked off. There were so many cars parked along the street and on a trailer I saw a rally car that appeared to have rolled over. I would still love to see a rally first hand, but the amount of people walking down the road told me that it might have been over already. The route to the castle was blocked, and the deviation wasn’t at all labeled, so we headed off to Dijon. We drove for about 40 km before Julie realized we were heading north. She had me pull the van over and we confirmed that we should be heading south-west. To our dismay, Dijon was 5hrs away and not the 1hr we had originally thought. So we turned the van around and continued on the mountain road until we came across a rest stop and had some lunch while we figured out a place to stay for the night.